Forensic psychology

• Three ways of measuring crime:

  • Official statistics
  • Victim Surveys
  • Offender Surveys
• Problems with defining crime:

  • Definitions of crime differ across cultures (eg. Homosexuality)
  • Definitions of crime change over time
• Top-down approach:

  • Refers to the analysis of previous crimes creating a profile of a likely offender
  • Profilers use this knowledge to narrow the field of possible suspects
  • Relies on the intuition and beliefs of the profiler
• Organised offenders:

  • Crimes committed by an offender who planned the crime
  • May engage in violent fantasies with the victim
  • Perpetrator is high in intelligence and socially competent
• Bottom-up approach:

  • Data-driven approach using statistical techniques to predict characteristics of an offender
• Disorganised offenders:

  • Crime scenes left with many clues such as fingerprints
  • Little evidence of engagement with the victim
  • Offender has low intelligence and competence
• Define ‘crime’:

  • Refers to any behaviour that is unlawful and justified to be punished by the state
  • Acts harmful to an individual, group, or society as a whole
• Biological explanation for criminal behaviour:

  • Atavistic form suggests certain individuals are born with a criminal personality
  • Innate personality due to earlier primate forms
• Geographical profiling:

  • Bottom-up profiling based on the pattern shown by the location of a series of crimes
• Antisocial personality disorder:

  • Neural differences in the brains of criminals and non-criminals
  • Associated with a lack of empathy and reduction of grey matter in the prefrontal cortex
• Who devised atavistic form:

  • Cesare Lombroso
• Mirror neurons implicated in crime:

  • Help with understanding behaviour
  • Dysfunction may lead to a lack of empathy and increased likelihood of committing a crime
• Epigenetics:

  • Study of changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression
  • Acts as a switch to activate or deactivate a gene
• Methods of dealing with offending behaviour:

  • Custodial Sentencing
  • Behaviour Modification
  • Anger Management
  • Restorative Justice
• Issues with restorative justice:

  • Reliant on offender showing remorse
  • May not be cost-effective
  • Not suitable for all types of offences
  • Seen as too lenient on the offender
• Cognitive distortions:

  • Biased thinking not consistent with reality
• Extraversion:

  • Outgoing individuals who enjoy risk and danger due to underaroused nervous systems
• Kohlberg’s moral dilemma study:

  • Criminal offenders at a lower level of moral reasoning (preconventional level)
  • Non-criminals tend to progress to the conventional level and beyond
• Hostile attitude bias:

  • Automatically attributing bad intentions to another person
• Neuroticism:

  • People with a negative outlook who are easily upset
  • Lack of stability due to an overactive response to threat
• Crime


  Any illegal act which is punishable by incarceration or another type of punishment, after consideration by a judge and jury in a legal trial
• There exist historical and cultural issues with defining 'crime'
• Historical issues with defining crime

  • What was considered a crime at one point in history, may not be considered a crime according to modern standards (e.g. homosexuality only being legalised in the UK in 1967)
• Cultural issues with defining crime

  • Smacking a child in one culture may be seen as acceptable or even encouraged as a form of 'tough love', whereas this is not the case in the UK - smacking a child so that a mark is left is now punishable by law, according to the 2004 Child's Protection Act
• Methods of measuring crime

  • Official Statistics
  • Victim Surveys
  • Offender Surveys
• Official Statistics


  The number of crimes reported to and recorded by the police, which have been processed and published by the Home Office on an annual basis
• Victim Surveys


  50,000 randomly selected households self-report the number and types of crimes which have been committed against them during the past year, and is published by the Crime Survey for England and Wales annually
• Offender Surveys


  A randomly-selected cohort of criminals give details of the types and frequency of crimes they have committed across a set time period (e.g. during the last year), as recorded by The Offender Crime and Justice Survey
• Official statistics are susceptible to concealing the 'dark figure' of crime (where 75% of crime goes unreported)
• Sudden increases in incidence rates of theft could be explained by a change in police recording policies, where thefts under £10 were recorded
• Victim surveys may suffer from 'telescoping', where the victim may mistakenly believe that a crime had been committed against them significantly more recently than it actually had been, due to the trauma and distress associated with it
• Data collected from Offender Surveys may be distorted or biased because it has been collected from offenders who may want to over-exaggerate or under-exaggerate their crimes
• Top-down approach to offender profiling

  Uses a pre-established typology and the FBI method of profile generation to assign offenders to one of two categories: organised or disorganised offenders
• Profile generation (top-down approach)

  1. Crime scene classification

  2. Crime reconstruction

  3. Data assimilation

  4. Profile generation
• Organised offenders


  • Socially and sexually competent, showing evidence of planning and so are unlikely to leave the body or clues at the crime scene, tend to have a specific 'type' of victim, and appear to carry out the attack in an almost surgical manner
• Disorganised offenders


  • Have the opposite characteristics to organised offenders, showing no evidence of planning and so frequently leave the body and clues at the crime scene, their attacks appear to be random, with no specific target and more likely to occur close to their own home or operational base, they are socially and sexually incompetent, often living alone and being unemployed
• The top-down approach can only be used to explain crimes where there have obvious, visible characteristics (e.g. rape and sadistic murder) and so are unlikely to be effective in identifying criminals who are responsible for burglary or middle-class crimes, such as financial fraud
• It is unlikely that all offenders are able to be identified as either organised or disorganised
• There is evidence to support the existence of an organised offender type, but the same cannot be said for the disorganised type
• Bottom-up approach to offender profiling

  Uses no pre-established typology but develops a profile as the crime scene and eyewitness testimonies are increasingly analysed, the two hallmarks are investigative psychology and geographical profiling